I forgot when it comes to the NBA this board doesn't actually watch the games, he wasn't better than Jaylen Brown last year in the playoffs, Tatum and Brown were the 2 best Celtics and no calculator can tell me otherwise.
Nobody’s reputation was hurt worse by the Anunoby 3 than Kemba’s ... and he wasn’t even on the floor. If the Cs played .5 seconds of defense, they are 7-0 in the playoffs without Hayward, and Kemba would have ripped the hearts out of Philly and Toronto. Instead the series goes 7. After G5 (nine playoff games total) he was actually second in the league in offensive rating during the playoffs. Then he gets a box and one thrown on him and is maybe knocked off kilter (hell if the refs called the damn foul he drew at the end of regulation, G6 would have been a one off anomaly from a box and one and he would have gotten another day to rest before Miami - instead he had a tough G7 and it carried over to G1.
Miami was a frustrating series. They threw that inverted zone with Crowder and Butler at the top largely to stop Kemba’s pick and roll game and making sure they always had their best defenders in his vicinity. They stuck their weaker defenders in the corners where he wouldn’t see them. Kemba averaged 20 and had a few spurts where it felt like he’d have one of his signature games, but wasn’t impactful enough, and he missed a couple of really clean looks in the fourth of G6 that he needed to make to stop the slide.
But he could have had that same series with Miami after sweeping Philly and Toronto, with arguably the greatest buzzer beating pass in NBA history, and it would have been a successful first playoff run. Instead Tatum, Theis and Brown fell asleep on the back line of the zone, and people think it was a failure. But Toronto and Miami schemed their defense to take away Kemba because of how well he was playing, and make someone else beat them, and everyone else’s job was easier.
fivethirtyeight.com
